MEANWHILE IN AMERICA ‘WE WANTED TO CREATE A SUPERHERO WHO HAD HIS BASE IN INDIAN MYTHOLOGY AND WHAT BETTER THAN A SUPERHERO WHO HAD THE POWERS OF A NAAG’
Siddhartha Chandra carries three suitcases when he travels to Asia. Two of them return packed with comic books. That’s how he has built Michigan State University’s collection of Indian comic books, one of the largest in the United States: suitcase by suitcase, three times a year, for the last eight years. “You go, you buy, and you bring back,” says Chandra, director of the Asian Studies Center at Lansing, Michigan, and the driving force behind its rapidly growing collection of comic books from the region, including Indonesia and, improbably, North Korea.
Across Lake Michigan, Mara Thacker, an assistant professor and librarian of South Asian studies, has been diligently constructing her own collection of comic books from India at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, through trips to India, and by contacting comic-book fanatics online and in person. “At the moment,” Thacker declares , “we are tied with the library of University of Michigan, but we are very confident we will have the largest collection in the US soon.”
The University of Michigan has 1,763 titles from India. The University of Illinois has a collection of 1,500 comics. Comic books are increasingly seen as an integral part of popular culture and, thus, a valuable resource to understand a society, its people, culture and values. Amar Chitra Katha publications that were focused on a mix of history and Hindu mythology actually helped shape what it was to be Indian among the middle classes in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, says Chandra.
But themes have been shifting from history and Hindu mythology and superheroes to contemporary subjects such as the Mumbai terrorists attacks, acid attacks on women and personalities. One of Chandra’s proudest additions to the his collection is the Amar Chitra Katha cover on Verghese Kurien, the founder of Amul and a Michigan State University alumnus.
Thacker is impressed by some of the new trends in India too – the use of digital drawing, colour saturation, the “creeping influence” of Japanese Manga style. A Chinese tale, Goliath of Shenzhen, she found, was an extremely interesting publication from Kolkata recently.
Other US universities, such as the University of Pennsylvania, also have sizable collections of Indian comic books but none of them are in the race for the top, not with the kind of numbers Michigan and Illinois have. And Thacker is right. Whichever collection wins the race in the United States, wins the world, with no competition from Europe.
Randy Scott, the Michigan university librarian, took up the job in 1974. His first brush with Indian comic books came in the 1970s, at a local book store in Lansing, where he lives. “They had probably been left by some customers or a tourist,” he recalled. “They seemed exotic.” He bought them, and that was the start of the university’s effort to procure more titles.
The race for the biggest Indian comics collection in America is hotting up!